This Week in Startups - The Strip Mining Era of LLMs—And Why It’s About to End | E2141

Episode Date: June 21, 2025

Today’s show:AI has been feasting on the open web—but is the free lunch over? In this explosive episode, @Jason and @alex call out OpenAI and others for “strip mining” the internet’s content without paying creators. As lawsuits pile up and new defenses like AI-robots.txt emerge, a reckoning looms. Will AI be forced to pay for its training data? Dive into the legal, ethical, and business implications—including Substack’s stance, Cloudflare’s firewall, and Perplexity’s lawsuits—in what may be a turning point for the future of the web.Timestamps:(0:00) Concerns about AI data sourcing and sustainability(1:43) Recent travels and airline industry insights(5:28) Meta's AI strategy and market competition(10:20) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist(11:50) Meta's financial moves and AI focus(17:08) Midjourney's advancements in video AI(20:30) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(21:33) Twist 500 companies and Cloudflare's anti-AI scraping tool(27:09) AI scraping: creator impact and regulation debate(30:18) Retool - Visit https://www.retool.com/twist and try it out today.(31:23) BBC lawsuit and Perplexity's AI challenges(35:44) Office hours with Giram Taitana of Doctours(42:55) Medical tourism: Psilocybin, IVF, and consumer trust(49:33) Design's role in trust and safety for medical platforms(55:57) Doctours' fundraising and insurance strategies(1:00:08) SEO and domain name tips for startups(1:02:50) Tesla's robo taxi launch and implications(1:08:13) Andy Jassy on AI's impact on employment(1:10:09) Discussing global job displacement and China's youth unemployment(1:14:53) The gig economy in the age of advanced AISubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(10:20) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist(20:30) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(30:18) Retool - Visit https://www.retool.com/twist and try it out today.Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

I noticed that on OpenAI, at least, the sources are kind of buried now. They don't put them up prominently enough. I think they should say, you know, we collected this information from this website before they present the data. Honestly, I think everybody should block these tools. And they should en masse sue these LLMs for a licensing fee. This is all good for the industry. The industry starts starting to think, you start thinking about sustainability,

not just doing what they're doing now, which is strip mining. The strip mining by LLMs is going to just destroy the environment and then there'll be nothing left for everybody else. Stop taking the calcite from Gorbon, destroying the planet or the Khyber crystals, you know. It's almost like overfishing. They're overfishing. They're going to take every piece of cod out of the ocean

and then they're going to wonder where the cod went. Just take 10% of the cod, you know? Like you don't have to take 100% and maybe, you know, leave whatever the cod eat. You gotta be sustainable. This weekend startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com slash twist to post your first job for free.

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that's designed for developers and built for the enterprise visit retool.com slash twist and start your free trial today. All right everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I'm Jay Cowell. He's Alex. Tons of news going on in big tech, tons of startup news. We'll try to thread that he'll get between those two things. What do we got today in the news? What's the top? Give me the top two or three stories as you see them here on Friday, June 20th, as you can see if you're watching the YouTube channel or Spotify, I guess, does video too. I am in Los Angeles. My road trip continues. How many airline miles do you have, Jason? Is it like 20 billion at this point in time? No, you know, it's very simple. When you own a company, all the miles collect to you

because you book all the tickets, right? So anybody who travels business for our company, you know, we centrally consolidate all those, and then we get to use them. You know, I always find that airline thing was a bit of a scam. When I was on the other side of it, I was an employee. I was like, yeah, give me the miles. And I was like, wait a second, this is incredible. For business, they bribe the employees to buy higher level tickets to get more points. And then it's working against the best interests of the company.

It was very funny. I have spent too many cycles. I tried not to do this, but too many cycles trying to figure out how they're systems work and I realize, oh, it's a video game. Miles, lounges, it's all a video game. Either you can play that game and it takes up hours of your life, or I can read one more ad on a podcast or do 10 minutes of a speaking gig and make double that and never worry about it again. So now I just got the America's Express Platinum card, the United Cards, and I paid a hundred thousand miles just to have a family plan for the lounges

because it is getting a little uncivilized out there in commercial travel. The crowds are, I mean, I guess the economy, you know, I keep hearing the economy and like maybe it's slowing down or maybe people aren't flying as much domestically. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy at these airports. It's crazy in the airports. And what I'm kind of blown away by,

and I don't want to look back at my younger years and say those were better. because I, you know, rose tinted glasses, Jason. But does it seem to you that flights just don't really leave on time anymore? Never. And they also are always oversold. And so I feel like every time I go to the airport, I'm like, all right, putting on my gladiatorial gear. And I just want to freaking get on the seat that I bought and not be harassed too much and maybe have a Coke. You know, like it's not great.

Pretty crazy. I mean, I guess we take it for granted in some ways that you can fly anywhere, anytime, for a very reasonable price, which I think. is the major success of this, but it does come at a price. Yes. If you keep lowering the cost and you keep working on that as a product strategy, and it does seem to be pretty competitive. You would think there was less competition in airlines because of, you know, how expensive it is.

I feel like I have four choices, three choices of carriers. Every time I fly somewhere in the United States, it's like a Delta, Southwest, JetBlue, United. I mean, it's like almost everybody fly American. Here's what I want, though, Jason. If you want to buy a car, you can buy a nice, a nice low-cost Kia, super dependable. We'll get you where you want to go, not flashy. Or you can go and get yourself a hand-pitched Bentley.

Where's the Porsche Cayman middle ground of airlines? You know, like... The Economy Plus, yeah, there should be something in the middle. You're right. I think who used to be that? I think JetBlue had a pretty good case to make there. Or Virgin America... That was dead, yeah.

No, Virgin America was great. So good. Can't believe they sold that. Yeah, it's a bummer. All right. So what are the top stories in the news today? Let's get through the news and some startup news. Yes, sir.

So the number one story, I think, is that meta's enormous AI push is now really impacting the startup world. Recall, Jason, that they are trying to build a new super intelligence team. This is where the scale AI quasi acquisition came into play. The latest story is that safe super intelligence, which is the company that Ilya, I always forget how to pronounce his last name, Sutskiver. Susskevur. Suts. Suts. Suts. Suts. Kver.

Sutskiver. Yeah, I think we got it. Yeah. That former open AI leader, Ilya, founded with Daniel Gross. Safe superintelligence, or just S-S-S-I, raised, I believe, $3 billion, and was recently valued at $32 billion. Now, META wanted to buy it outright. And reporting says that, you know, Ilya said, no thank you. I'm not interested in that. And so what META is doing is probably, it is working on, taking the other co-founder, Daniel Gross, and also his investing partner, Nat Friedman, the former GitHub CEO, in kind of a package deal

while also taking a stake in those two gentlemen's venture capital fund. So probably a pretty big investment here for meta, once again underscoring how much money they're willing to put to work. I'm just getting it a little perplex, Jason, at these weird AI deals and why every single one of them seems to be multi-part and complex. And I'm trying to figure out why, I guess. Yeah, there's a very simple why behind this.

If you go pull up the Facebook market cap and their cash hoard, just generally speaking, broad numbers, and then you put it against the prize for winning the AI race, artificial general intelligence, super intelligence, superhuman intelligence. People are using different words for this. We had a little debate about it on All-in, which will come out. I think the same time you'll be listening to this. Okay. It's a big prize.

It'll affect many, many different industries. White collar, blue collar. We've talked about this. You know, you've got soft-driving cars and robots and factories like Amazon. Basically, every industry is going to be impacted by this. So whoever wins gets there first or becomes one of the top three players is going to take part in a $10 trillion prize, let's say. And you have a market cap. like Zuckerberg does of...

So it's $1.72 trillion. Okay, $1.7 trillion. Yeah. In the last quarter, Medez's operating cash flow, Jason, was $24.0 billion, and its free cash flow was $10.3 billion. And the company's current cash, cash equivalence, and marketable securities was $70.2 billion as of March 31st. Okay, so you get $70 billion laying around.

You pay a dividend, right? I believe that's the dividend paying company now. Yep. And you've got a giant market cap. The market cap of this prize, if it's $10 trillion, has the ability to double or triple your market cap. If you were to win, but 25% of it, you know, win $2.5 trillion in market cap easily added, right?

So even if you got the, let's say, gold gets 50% of the market share and silver gets 25 and bronze gets 15 and everybody else shares the rest or whatever, some distribution there, which we see in other industries. Absolutely. You might see a similar thing with smartphones, right?

Two players, a duopoly, and then a long tail of, like, weird phone companies at the end. What would it make sense if you had a bet in poker and the implied odds where you could triple your market cap and secure your legacy? How much would you be willing to gamble? How much would you be willing to risk is the question. I think he would be willing to risk easily 20%, 10, 20%, would not even be a scratch, right? it's just like a bruise. It's not a big deal if you lost 10 or 20%.

It's like, Elon losing a rocket the other day. It's like, oh, that's a little... Oh, man. That's a little stingy. You know, like, oh, gosh. You know, it stings, but it's not like SpaceX is going anywhere.

They're launching two or three rockets a week of the other ones, but... No, but every time Starship doesn't crush it, Jason, it sets back the Alex gets to space date ever so slightly. And every day... You're getting there. I get old, man.

Like, I really want Starship to work. So, yeah, that's what this comes down to. On a personal basis, he's willing to risk 20% of his legacy. that's $170, that's $350 billion in market cap, 20% of their cash on hand, you know, and cash flow coming. And they could basically just say to the shareholders,

we're not going to post a profit anymore. We're not going to do a dividend. And we're going to be buying and investing in artificial intelligence like nobody's business. And, well, yeah, we'll still do the meta-glasses thing, but that's going to be, you know, they're going to have to make it work with, percent of their budget. They can just make slow incremental progress. We're going for this prize now.

All right. We all know if you're a founder, or even if you want a small business, you're thinking about your company 24-7, 365 days a year. That's the life of a founder. This is not clock in, clock out, nine to five gig for you as the business owner. So when you're hiring, you want a partner that's as equally as committed as you are. And that's, of course, LinkedIn jobs. LinkedIn jobs is like your co-founder, they're going to make it so simple for you to post your jobs for free on LinkedIn, where there are one billion members. You're going to be able to share what you're posting and actually keep all the promising candidates organized in one place. And also, LinkedIn is going to help you quickly write a job and get it in front of the right people, whether you want to

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Terms and conditions do apply. So here's a fun question. How much money did meta spend in Q1 on dividend payments? Well, it turns out the answer. Actually, do you want a guess or do you just want the answer? Oh, well, let's think about it. I don't know. Let me get you a deal number.

Well, I'm going to just say $10 billion. It was only $1.3 billion in the quarter, but they also re-bought $13.4 billion worth of their shares. I think we forget occasionally how much money the Mags, in May because I'm like, oh, you know, a billion here, but it really adds up. It turns out, nah, not so much. I mean, their free cash flow is like $3 billion a month. The way you look at this is the same bet opening I made on Johnny Ive. Yeah. So Sam Wotman's out there like, I can't believe they're offering $100 billion to an employee of mine. He's clutching his

burles. Did you see that whole thing? And like, oh, my God, this is terrible. Yeah. And it turns out he gave $6.5 billion to, like, Johnny Ive. For part-time work. Yeah, like Johnny I've. I think probably Johnny Ive owns, you know, some significant percentage of that company. It was this company. So if he owns at least half of it or two-thirds of it, of that $6.5 billion, you got $4 billion. So you paid $4 billion for one employee.

And you're complaining about somebody getting $100 million, $100 million signing boost when you just gave somebody 50 times that or 60 times that. Yeah. When this many smart people believe the prize is imminent. and the prize is big. You get to see some unnatural things occur. And that's what we're saying. I think that's totally valid. Now, a question for you is,

when is it too early to sell? Because safe super intelligence, Ilius company is incredibly young. There's no product on the market yet. They haven't really even shown off much of what they're building. We know it's AI and probably super intelligence with extra safety controls. I mean, just given the name.

But Jason, you know, why wouldn't you take such an enormous potential check from the meta? He's post money. He's post money. He's got enough equity in open AI that, again, when you're talking about individuals and individual behavior, it has to do often in the early part of people's careers. You see this anxious, grinding, desperately trying to get to money. And people seem like they are just aggressive lunatics doing cutthroat things. Then later in your career, you have money in the bank.

You realize you're not spending it. You realize the cheeseburger tastes the same. If it's a $10 really good in-and-out burger, a $50 one with a little wago in it, or like I had one time like a $100 burger in New York, there was like this craze. And it had black truffles on it for like, and, you know, whatever. You know, I sat there and I just, I was with a couple people. One of them, one or two of them were billionaires and stuff like that. And I realized, ah, this is pretty interesting.

A door dash driver could work five hours and enjoy the same $100 hamburger as the billionaires and everybody in between. So once you get to that level, you start to understand non-economic reasons to do things in life. None of those billions matter. Nothing after like the first 10 or 20 or $30 million actually matters, to be totally honest.

So here we are. That's why it's making a non-economic decision. The economic decision would be to take those chips immediately. Yeah. And if he didn't have the open AI shares and whatever else he earned at his career, I bet you he would. I was trying to figure out,

what is the dollar value of independence? But I think that's actually the wrong question to ask you. The real question is, are you willing to once again go work for someone else instead of yourself if you don't have to? And the answer just appears to be no. Also, producer lawn pulled up. That was called the Money's No Object Burger, we think, Jason. So it was Wagyu.

It was Gray Day Hudson foie gras, an onion marmalade made with a port, and then also a quarter inch of freshly shaved Italian white truffles. That doesn't actually sound like good. Too much going on. Yeah. Way too much. Actually, you know what? An Inal burger is like one of the five. In and out is incredible, yeah.

I have, like, there's so many run-ins with the tech industry in-and-out, like Postmates put In-N-Out Burger. I think DoorDish did it without permission. And then they got in trouble. They got in trouble for that. They are making it happen in Dallas. We talked about it before in a previous episode. There are lots of eight-pound deliveries occurring right now.

Yeah. I'm more convinced than ever that Door-Dash drivers are going away. That entry-level wrong job is going to be done by these little four-wheel R2D2s, the cocoa and... Serve robotics. Serve robotics. Those things are working. I think they're largely flawless,

and if one of them gets knocked out, who cares? They are remote operated. There's teleoperation going on there, but soon it won't be. The drone delivery seemed farcical, and now it feels inevitable to me. One last thing on the Justin. Before we go on,

I just looked at at shake shack, stock price, $132 a share, win public at 21. Okay, so they're doing good. Yeah, they're doing fantasticly. I wonder what the price earning is on that. I wonder if, like, how do you value, I wonder if it's a meme stock or if it's, like, a legit, just being valued like any other fast food chain.

I don't cover that sector, obviously, so I have no idea. And this also seems to be a very big trend with these. I wonder if it is built to last or if it's, you know, like the Korean yogurt phase of red mango and all those that swept California. I don't know if you remember that. Everybody had to go out for yogurt, you know, and get these, like, tangy yogurts. it just went away. So, it turns out it's four,

well, three to four X price sales just as a data point. All right, moving on. I want to talk about mid-jurney. This is a company that, Jason, I had not actually put on the Twist 500 because they've effectively not raised any known capital. And so they were a little bit outside of the domain of the Twist 500. But after what they announced today

and a couple of other reasons, I am going to put them on. I'll explain that later. The news here is that Mid-Journey, which is famous for its image-generating tools, has finally moved into the video space. And for a company that has reportedly reached nine figures of revenue and has quite a lot of market reach,

it's kind of a big moment for the company. So I took the liberty of grabbing an image of you. Okay. I'll show everyone this. A Jason approved image of himself. I believe this is from the all-end show. And then if you take that image and give it to the new model. Wow.

Yeah. And what's interesting it is Jason, this is actually a five second clip because it does it in five second chunks now. But it automatically made me four different versions. And so I just went ahead and picked the one that I thought made you look the least creepy because it doesn't quite get the mouth right. If you watch, it's a little too

static. But this is prompt free. I literally just gave it this image. And V1, their new video model, made this in a number of other things. Very impressive. Well, this is super impressive when you compare it to like the Irishman, Netflix did. you know, the Scorsese film, where they de-hed folks.

And, yeah, I heard a story about that one where they wanted to use this de-aging technology, but it would have required them to put, like, the ping-pong balls and, you know, on De Niro's face and Al Pacino's face. And they're like, yeah, well, not doing it. It's not for us, you know, and they refused to do it.

But then the Netflix team, you know, was told they're 18 months away from, like, the deep fake thing working. And so they shot it with that technology. And they said they'll get it done in post. And they, it was okay. But a lot of people complained about it. Then there was Luke Skywalker in the Mandalorian.

They de-aged at this point, you know, if you didn't see it, it's okay. No more spoiler alerts. But they de-aged Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill is obviously pretty old. That one didn't quite cross the Uncanny Valley. This is better than both of those. I want to show one more example, because this is the first one that really sold me on this. Before I went ahead and made one of you, Jason. This is from a prompt that a user had done over on the Mid Journey service.

And the prompt was, just reading it for everybody, a portrait of a woman in the grass with sunset lighting, her long hair is blowing in the wind, and the red colored light is shining on it against a dark blue background. This is a hyper-realistic photograph with a cinematic feel. And as you can see on my screen, there is that image. And then you click play because it turned it into a five-second clip. Watch this.

I mean, that's incredible. Yeah, indistinguishable from the, from real life if you were scrolling. I mean, if I told you, like, we're doing a test right now, you have to pick the AI one. You might pick it. Like, if you really studied it,

you can look for little clues and stuff like that. But yeah, it's, it crosses the uncanny valley as defined by me, as if it was scrolling in your feed, you wouldn't be able to tell. Investors like me are not going to invest in your business unless you're structured properly.

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Next up is a bit of news from a group. of twist 500 companies, Jason. My favorite, I think, cohort of companies. Talked about them a law on the show. Created by humans, one of your investments, Tolbert and Human Native. The latest news here that I'm really interested in. Explain what those are, that little, yeah, since most people are, it's a new category. Yeah.

So these are companies, startups, that want to create a marketplace that connects IP holders, people who own a podcast like Jason or a blog like me, and have content that AI companies may want to train or otherwise access, and essentially creates a marketplace where they can reach commercial terms for that. The problem that websites are facing is getting worse. People are scraping more, and they're sending fewer people back,

and the ratios get getting more and more out of whack. So the news here, apart from just the overall situation getting worse, is that Cloudflare is building a tool that is going to, they claim, really wall off unwanted AI scraping. And if this tool works as well as Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare kind of says that it's going to, he joked that he's taking on North Koreans every day. He can surely take on some C-Corp based out of Palo Alto. Then it could overnight change the math on AI usage because people do a lot of AI searches.

And that involves a lot of AI bots going out and scraping data. So I'm encouraged by this as a person who writes on the internet. I'm also kind of thinking this is going to be a huge boon to companies like. I told it because suddenly if they have no access to stuff, people are going to have to go out and pay for it. Well, I'm an investor in one of these created by humans. And I think it's great that there'll be a market for content on the web and allowing people to do the right thing. And I think the lawsuits are going to keep piling up. I know that people use rag and all these things.

They search websites. You know, when you do an opening eye search now, it almost by default goes out. out to the open web and then create your response. So I think the reason they're doing that is the legal reason. I noticed that on OpenAI at least, the sources are kind of buried now. They don't put them up prominently enough. I think they should say, you know, we collected this information from this website before they present the data. I think the content companies on the web should start forcing them to change how this stuff is presented to increase the clickbacks to their website. and then they could make a Google-like arrangement,

which is, you know, you search, people search, we send you traffic, it should be okay with you. But honestly, I think everybody should block these tools and they should en masse sue these LLMs for a licensing fee. You know, if you're doing it professionally for a business, and if you're doing a blog and you don't care, if it's your personal blog or you're doing cautious optimism and you think, I don't care, like, just put me in there.

I want to be represented. And, you know, those people are never going to pay $100 a year for a substack, so who cares? This is all good for the industry. The industry starts starting to think, he starts thinking about sustainability, not just doing what they're doing now, which is strip mining. The strip mining by LLMs is going to just destroy the environment, and then there'll be nothing left for everybody else. Stop taking the calcite from Gorbon destroying the planet, or the khyber crystals, you know. If you succeed in stripping all this stuff, you're just going to be nothing left. It's almost like overfishing.

They're overfishing. They're going to take every piece of cod out of the ocean and then they're going to wonder where the cod went. Just take 10% of the cod, you know? Like you don't have to take 100% and maybe, you know, leave whatever the cod eat. You got to be sustainable. I think I said enough here.

So I also asked creative of humans what they think is the best way to go about creating a more equitable marketplace. And they said something that kind of surprised me a little bit. They wrote, I'm just going to quote here, we recommend evolving the robots.txti protocol into an AI-robots.txd standard so that websites can specify what's available and what's not with a few lines of code. This could free up most of the web for training without a license while ensuring that commercial or paywall works are clearly

marked as opt-in only inaccessible through licenses. So I think that's very generous, but I feel like people still just go around it and say that it's rag and it's fair use. And I don't think, I think they need to be meaner is my take for it. You know, so there's two ways you can do things, you know, as an industry. You can be regulated or you can use the legal system or you can create your own systems. It really is three ways. A lawsuit can happen that you produced a movie and my underage kid went to it and they were traumatized by it and they saw the exorcist and now I had to send him to therapy. I wonder if that happened.

So the music industry, the movie industry would then have to deal with a lawsuit and hiring lawyers. then you could be regulated by the industry, by the government. The government could say, you know, you guys are out of control. We're going to regulate you. Now you got to go to a censor. We got this like group in Washington that's going to check your work and, you know, we'll do it for you. Or you can do what they did quite sensibly, create the MPA,

where they gave a bunch of money to an organization that they created. And then when parents came to them and complained, they said, well, we have the MPA. Would you please go visit their office or, you know, they'll do a call with you and explain the strategy. and they're responsible, and they are the arbiter of what gets PG-V-G-13, and you can take your complaint to them, and the government could go call that group, right? That's what the industry needs here. And the industry should do it, or else it's going to be endless lawsuits,

and then there'll be lawsuits from consumers, and then the government will eventually step in. And the great news here is we just talked about how much money is in AI. I think that the first firm to do a deal with Disney to create characters, you know, for image generation, and to create short stories for it, and have an exclusive in it is going to get 10% more users. Go to Disney, say, we want to make the ability for you to Jedi yourself, right? You can go make a Jedi lightsaber. We want you to Jedi yourself and pay, or you can make yourself a Marvel character. So you say, Marble. Marvel mate, and it makes Alex and Jason into Marvel characters, and we can put ourselves as

Iron Man or, and we can make a short video of ourselves in the Iron Man outfit, press the button, the face mask opens, and boom, it's your face. Whoever does that first, whether it's XAI, Claude, Mid-Journey, pick the company, Open AI, whoever has the wisdom to do that, some cynics might say open up the can of worms, just make a 10-year deal, and then anytime anybody else does it, then Open AI could sue Claude, or Claude could sue OpenEye. or Google Gemini could do whoever, or some new entrant, you know, I'll just company, could say,

hey, we're doing it, we got the license, now you're infringing on our ability to do commerce and Disney, so you're getting two people who are upset. That's what happens, you know, when you start going above board and you create standards. Those commercial relationships

will then create consensus and voting blocks legally and the industry can work it out themselves. So I really hope that people do this. And you would make a thoughtful decision one cautiously optimistic. Cautious optimism, sorry. I mean, I would, I mean, I just like money.

So, sure. If someone came to me with a check, I'd be like, thank you. Much like you were your book. What if five of them, I mean, if you said, hey, you can ingest all of this. And every time you read the page is $10. If you want to, if you want each, each of my articles is $10 to have in your LLM for all time. And there's 20 LLMs that pay you, $10 each. You get $200 in incremental revenue per piece you write.

By the way, that's when a piece gets paid in today's world. If you're Zuckerberg and give $100 million to a developer to join your firm, you can start giving a million dollars each or $100,000 each to a thousand different, you know, writers. So pick your favorite thousand rights. Now, will Zuckerberg ever do that? No, unless he gets sued. And that's really what has to happen. Substack needs to sue Zuckerberg and say, you ingested this stuff.

It's clear you ingested it. is substack plus the writers should be going to created by humans. And now you've got the writer, the platform, substack, and created by humans, all going to Zuckerberg and saying, hey, here's 2,000 writers that you ingested. Here's substack, which is in partnership with them. And by the way, we're in partnership with them. Yeah. So F, Y, P, M. Frack, you pay me.

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The BBC is threatening to sue perplexity. BBC is a British broadcasting corporation. And perplexity, of course, is the very well-known AI search startup. Jason, we talked about how it crossed 100 million in ARR earlier this year. Hundreds of millions of searches done each month. And the BBC is like, hey, stop taking our stuff, delete what you have, and offer us some money. And perplexity is saying that the BBC's claims are manipulative and opportunistic. and that they, quote, have a fundamental misunderstanding of technology,

the internet and intellectual property law. The other thing here from the FT is that apparently the BBC is in talks with other AI companies, including Amazon. So my read here is that everyone else is going to pay. Perplexity didn't want to, and so they're going to get sued. But I think that's a mistake. I think they should have just paid. Yeah, I mean, you and I are on the content side.

It's fairly obvious, you know, if it's just the headline of the story, and you're sending traffic, then perplexing, then, you know, FT and BBC and everybody else would have a different position. When you ingest it, put it into your learning, you know, you summarize it. If it's maybe behind a paywall, that creates another issue.

So FT is behind a payroll. So here's the thing, though. What if your competitors aren't acting ethically and you want to? So for founders, let's say that their competitors is just scraping everyone's information without doing proper compensation where should you draw the line on like maintaining your ethics, Jason,

but also not getting run out of town by a competitor who might have a more fast and loose approach to say fair use? Oh, well, what happens is these competitors all will then go to those content providers and start the pot. It's kind of like immigration. Here we go. The people who are most pissed off about an open border are the people who came in and waited in line, which makes total sense.

If you waited in line for your hamburger, and somebody cut the line, you're like, that's effed up. I don't care if I've already finished my, if I finished my hamburger five years ago and I see you cut in the hamburger line, I'm not happy. And I think that's what you see here is like the fairness thing.

And this is all, you know, when you talk about fair use, there are instances of fair use that people who are doing non-commercial projects or using small amounts of the original work or doing commentary on the original work that perplexity is just not going to fall into. If perplexity used a human,

to summarize these articles, read them and summarize them, even if they're behind a paywall, you could do that. That is fair use. If a human does it, it is not fair use if you do it programmatically with a machine. Fair use means that somebody's giving their opinion, they're transforming the work, and they're making some commentary. So I could literally take the most protected image in the world, whatever it is, whatever it happens to be.

Could be like, who protects their IP the most? Disney, Mickey Mouse. I could literally take a Mickey Mouse cartoon, do commentary over it, picture and a picture, and play the entire movie. And if you want proof of this, there's a Star Wars film where a guy does his own video commentary over a Star Wars film. This guy who was not a fan of the prequels speaks and talks over the prequels and does it. There's also a group of people who redid the prequels and took like Anacens whining out and made it a little bit darker. and I think they took episodes one and two and two and two and three and made it into like a three-hour movie, but took out a lot of the whining and made it more like hardcore.

So anyway, long story short, people can do transformative works. This is not that. And if you want an example of a transformative work called Business Insider. Business Insider's entire business was to subscribe to pay walls and to circumvent them. So every story on the information, you can go watch. Tofer Grace did this edit, did his edit of the fan. The Phantom Manit. Yeah. There you go. Shout-out. Shout-out, Tofer. Well done.

And, you know, if you do it non-commercially and you're not making money, it's transformative. You're making some sort of a statement. You might be able to get away with it. You know, you still could get sued. Yeah, you still might. People will have a long-term debate. The thing that's very interesting about fair use cases, they all get settled. So to find a fair use case that got actually to completion is really hard. Okay, let's keep going. All right. Jason, it's time for an office hours.

I'm really excited about this one. We are going to talk to Jiram Taitina from Doctor's. Jason, he is the co-founder and CEO. Doc Tours is in the launch accelerator cohort number 34. And, well, he comes up here on the screen. I'll just tell you their one simple sentence is that they are a medical tourism marketplace. pronounce your name for us one more time. So we get it right?

It's G-I-R-U-M. G-R-U-M. G-R-U-M. It is actually your name. You don't know this. Greek name, Gerom Topolis. It means to be wise and hardworking and return huge amounts of tributary to your investors. This is what it means. That's exactly what we're working for. Perfect. I heard you guys were talking about Greek Pides before this. Yeah, absolutely. So, Giram, what a great idea.

You know, I love a good marketplace. Tell us the state of tourism. I know people love to go to Mexico, to get breast augmentation, teeth. I don't know if it's a good idea or not. South Korea, amazing destination, Eastern Europe. It seems like cosmetic surgery is becoming people's passion, maybe too much in some cases, maybe too young.

Putting it all aside, people want to look good, okay. No shame in the game, I guess. I've been considering it since I got this Ozempic jowl here. I've got to figure out what to do. I need to get a little staple here or something they tell me. my friends who are now, they made fun of me for being fat, and now I'm getting made fun of for having a turkey thing here. I don't know. You tell me, Gerim, what I got to do.

But explain to me how big this market is. I want to start with market, because you have a marketplace. The market size really does matter. So how many Americans are going and doing this? Where are they going? What are the top treatments? Yeah. So I'll answer this across the world and then just the U.S. Okay. So if you look at the American market, There's about 1.4 million American medical tourist in 2024. This number is up from 340K COVID. So the market is really growing. If you look at the global market, cosmetic surgery is the biggest category of medical travel, like you mentioned.

But amongst Americans, it's actually dental. So it's dental, globally is cosmetic surgery, dental, followed by fertility treatment, which is very interesting. And a bunch of long tail procedures down the line. If you compare the number of medical tours to the global elective procedure spend, it's not that. It's actually a much, much smaller niche. So our vision is how can we dominate this niche and then grow it eventually to compete with the local elective procedure market. I see on the website, hair transplants are big, huh? They are. They're growing massively. So to speak. Yeah. So I don't know if you guys have

access to our slides or anything. If you look at the Google Trends data is just exploding, specifically in Turkey. If you all are on TikTok at all, you must have seen this. I have seen this on Turkey. They make this joke about the airline flights. You see these guys have like their heads bandaged with people going there. So what does it cost to do that in Turkey versus the U.S.?

And then what can people expect in terms of quality? Let me start with attacking the cost question first. By the way, there's good clinics in the U.S. There's good clinics abroad. There's terrible clinics in the U.S. There's terrible clinics abroad as well. But if you have a budget of, let's say, $10,000, you're going to the worst clinics in the U.S.

You don't want to travel. The same amount of money will get to the top tier doctor, which would be comparable to the top doctor here in the U.S. So holding costs constant, the quality that you get abroad is much, much higher. The second thing is the reason for platforms like doctor's need to be around is to protect the consumers from going to some basement and getting a treatment that isn't safe for them. We verify the clinic. We look at their local certifications, their global certifications, the number of Americans they see every single year,

verifyable reviews, et cetera, before listening to them to our website so that the American consumer could trust that the quality of care that they're getting is much, much higher. I was curious, how much work is it to actually go out there and vet these markets yourself as a company because I presume there's a lot of them. Do you have to go in person? How do you do the quality control on the recommendation side? Yeah, so far we've been asking them to submit their certifications. If you look at a country like Turkey, medical tourism is a national level priority for them. So they're quite strict, a lot stricter than the U.S. is for hair transplant clinics here in the U.S. So they submit their certifications. We can verify it with

the government websites. We also ask them to submit verifiable reviews, which are mostly videos. Our go-to-market is also TikTok. We partner with creators. who have done their hair transplant abroad at the clinics we list on our site. So there's very direct proof of the quality available abroad. Do you remove people from the site? If you get complaints, is there some sort of standard? I'm curious as you grow this, because you're a year one or two startup. I'm not sure how long it's been around. So we launched in January. So it hasn't even been a year yet. Got it. We even had any complaints so far. But yeah, we definitely take it down if something bad were to happen. Yeah. So I think that's,

That's like the interesting thing is how do you certify? And do you have multiple levels? Because it seems like you've started with actually hair transplants is the first category. Is there going to be a certification level? Because Airbnb now does like, I'm staying in an Airbnb here. I find myself now like super hosts. Superhost. That's the thing.

Yeah. And then there's one fine stay and VRBO. If you want it to pay 20% more and you know it's going to be incredibly great, design and managed by a management company. Somebody's going to visit you. Maybe they pre-stock the fridge, all that kind of good stuff. So do you have that concept in mind for your marketplace? Yeah, certainly in the future.

It's something that we'll have to do. Right now, we just look at their local certifications, but you can imagine doctor is having a board of surgeons here in the U.S. that come up with standards. And then now we go around our partner clinics and ask them to get certified. And we can give them a special bad, similar to the super host, and that, you know, given that they follow U.S. standards. This has two benefits.

One, you know, it's a guarantee safety for the American consumer, but also it could be a great revenue stream for us as these clinics pay to get these certifications every single year. One of the most interesting things I've just learned by doing a couple clicks on your website is that there are eyebrow, eyebrow and beard transplants. Correct. Stole my question. Where does a, wait, where's the donor hair coming for, because my beard does not come

like a beard. I have a really thick goatee. It's just, it's a mess. It's my Irish and Greek side competing with each other. Like my Greek side's got this great got this great gottee going and the rest is just patchwork.

How does that work? Yeah, so the typical donor area is the back of your head. Okay. And the sides as well. So if you've seen, you know, people lose their hair, like the top is gone,

but you'd still have like the crown over here. Yeah. At the back and the bottom will still be there. Yeah, you still got it. That's typically where the hair comes from. And sometimes you can ask your surgeon to take it from your back or your chest hair. A lot of times surgeons will deny that, but it is something you can.

Wow. It's like your back hair. I was talking to a number of companies that were in psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in what are called magic mushrooms or mushroom chocolates is how people typically ingest them at parties now in the United States. But the psilocybin, you can make synthetic psilocybin. I actually think Peter Thiel was an investor in this company. And I was like, why don't you find a country, send doctors, therapists, do it in a very controlled setting, have doctors ready, and that's exactly what started to merge, which is psychedelic or plant medicine tourism.

Have you looked into that, the psychedelic medicine and healing as a potential for doctor's? So we're trying to stay away from the whole medicine side of things. A lot of investors ask us, will you import medication from abroad and do arbitrage there, et cetera? like you said, have people travel for psychedelics. It's not something we're thinking about. Our growth plan is really winning in this hair transplant space, figure out what is the next market, which you think would be IVF,

and then launch dental shortly after that. Got it. And just stack verticals one out of time. Amazing. So IVF is, I've gone through it with my spouse, so I'm pretty familiar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have two IVF babies. Amazing.

Infertility. Very expensive, yeah. Well, as it turns out, in Rhode Island, it's mandatory covered as part of health insurance, which is a little state perk, yeah. So for us,

it was actually incredibly affordable. What is it? What would you know, did you ever look at the bills of what it actually cost your health care company? I don't look at bills. My wife is letting you do the accounting?

Do you remember how much you paid out of pocket? No. Or was a zero? It was some amount of money between zero and 10K. I didn't care. So just for context, if you were to get IVF

down here in the U.S., it could cost you 30K. Yep. if you have insurance, it can come down to 10. Going to a place like France or Spain, you can get the procedure done for under $5,000. So that's awesome. And that's the first world. We're not talking about emerging markets, frontier markets.

I mean, going to France or Spain sounds wonderful. People are going there every summer and going there for spring. It does feel like there's a lot more to IVF than a hair transplant. So do you think people would leave the country for a much longer period of time to do that kind of care? Because that would raise the price just for living expenses. Oh, yeah, travel. Well, well, people are already doing it. So it doesn't matter what I think. Will it grow is an interesting question. So you can look at the Google Trans data on this as well. For IVF, it looks similar to what hair transplants did in 2022. So we think it's going to rapidly

expand in the next few years. I was unaware. Yeah. Oh, you think it's a generational and they continue. Yeah. Well, Gen Z's turning 30. They're expected to be the biggest user of IVF. Also, social media is how the quality of care abroad is really shared. And they are the most influenced on what they see on social media. So we think 2030, you know, plus or minus one year would be great for IVF. So we're probably going to launch that market next. Any questions for me and challenges you have with the business? My question for you actually has to do with Preston Safety. You asked this. It's the most commonly asked question from investors as well. And I shared with, with you what we're doing on the back end to verify clinics and have them on our platform. I'm wondering what you think we should do to better communicate this with our consumers today. It's not a huge concern, but as we scale into bigger and bigger markets, I imagine that'll be here. You've famously invested in low trust businesses like Uber in the early days, Robin Hood, even.

How have you seen them grow past this? And what advice do you have for us? Proactive communication, rating systems, mutual arrangements. rating systems all played roles in those. Customer support plays a major role. Blog posts back in the day were great ways to communicate complex options. So here, you know, even in this conversation, you and I, you know, I asked you some questions about beards and you had like this incredible, then I asked you, hey, what about like, is eventually they're going to be gene therapies? You had a great answer. These discussions are not on your

website yet, right, because you're a young startup and, or maybe they are, you know, I guess in your FAQ, you have some of them. So I think, you know, to the extent you can explain these things to where your audience lives, which seems to be TikTok, your Instagram, I would keep working on refining the quality of those. You're in health care. I think making them really tight and highly produced, maybe a high quality, here's what a hair transplant is. I'm here at this clinic. here's three people we interviewed about it, like really getting into it. And then some of those, you might be able to put advertising behind and actually convert into customers. I'm assuming you get paid hundreds of dollars per referral, low hundreds of

dollars, something in that space, or each transaction's worth low hundreds of dollars. Am I ballpark correct? That ranges a lot, depending on what clinic you go to, but we're aiming, you know, $750 per person, all the way to $1,500 per person. Great. So you're getting 10, 20 percent of the procedure, which is pretty common in this kind of space. I think investing, you know, five or $10,000 in a couple of short videos, you know, really well as an investor in the company, having that highly produced asset that builds trust and, you know, having a way to build that content on a regular basis that takes these questions head on or finding a great doctor from a couple of clinics and then you having the doctor speak to it or you interviewing the customer

and the doctor and saying, tell me about recovery, you know, the scabbing, the itchiness, highly produced, you know, videos with the actual customers, with the actual people doing that, tours of the facilities, all those things would build trust. And consistency in the brand and the design of the brand does speak volumes as well. So if you look at both Uber and Robin Hood, their design, you know, today would be 10 out of 10, right? This is like world, world, world. class design. Their design started not dissimilar to yours. Your design's like a six or a seven, you know, in terms of aesthetics. And, you know, if you were to go to 10 designers and say, rate these websites, they'd probably give you a six or a seven in terms of, you know, 10 being

Robin Hood. Robin Hood came out of the gate at eight and a half, nine. They really worked on it. I would, again, as an investor, say, if you told me, I want to spend $5,000 with two different designers to make our design world-class, invest $10,000 in this, and then throw it all away, and then spend another $10,000 and do that in a year or six months later, and I'm going to drop $20,000 on design. I would say probably a good use. People do judge books by their cover, and really world-class design, although it seems of low importance. Airbnb was another one that was eight and a half, nine out of, maybe a nine out of design. So this is really an interesting thing, you know, I really appreciate your question. Design equals trust. We can all remember

the iterations of Uber. Alex will show you the first landing page for Uber. It's very famous how terrible this landing page was so much so it's almost like a meme. People share it all the time. And I remember when Travis was showing me like an early version, we were doing like a little product review. I said, you know, I got a question for you about the cab. You know, we're calling this Uber taxi or Uber cab. And I was like, you know, Uber cab is a dumb name because it's not a cab. So can we drop the cab and just call it Uber.com? And he said, yeah, we're doing that.

I said, can I get credit for that? And he's like, I don't understand. I was like, can you tell the press that I came up with that idea? So when they do the movie, just like Sean said drop the thigh, I can get credit for that. And he was like, sure. But we've already made the decision. I was like, I don't care about the decision. I just care about credit because it would be funny.

So here you go. And I'm friends with Charles Parker. on-demand car servers via iPhone and SMS, and it showed a cab, and when the cab moved, it hopped along the route, as you can see in that image, and it didn't change direction.

So when you see it at an intersection, it looks like it's coming towards you off of a 2D map. Like it's going to, like, jump in the screen and fly into the air, straight up, whereas now it points the direction it's going, obvious. And I was telling you about that. He's like, ah, it's my number one piece of feedback. It confuses everybody.

Nobody understands it. I'm like, yeah, but you could just make how many versions of the car are there? You just have do an overhead view. It's like south, northwest, east. And he's like, yeah, but then you have Broadway, which goes on an angle. You got this street. You know, I was like, ah, yeah. So you should just make one version and rotate.

It's like, I've had this conversation five freaking times, Jake. How can we stop talking about it? This looks like this is a five out of ten in design. So you're ahead of Uber. This is a one. This is the worst thing I've ever seen. I mean, it communicates what it does. On-demand car service via iPhone and S&S.

mess, book car in the app. So the checkbox is in the bullet point, join for free. The call to action is good or learn more. There is some good stuff here, how it works pricing blog. They did think through, objectively,

what people's questions are. And so you can kind of look in the history books and design equals trust is, I think, something we are going to put in our founder university and launch accelerator curriculum. So somebody make a note about

communicating that back to my team, please. I want a design equals trust. trust and then they can go to this clip in Q&A and maybe build a little curriculum around it. It's very important. Tell us a little bit about your experience in the program and we're up. We did founder you, I think, for a different idea. I don't remember how long ago.

Oh, really? And that's how we learned about lawn. Favorite part is getting intros to the investors after the pitches every week. It breaks my heart not getting ranked because there are so many great other companies in our cohort. but um competitive you all have in that's very competitive i think um and yeah you all have introduced us to some amazing first personal thinkers um you know investors who want to see what the future of elective procedures uh and we're we're thankful for that awesome yeah it's a device we have every week we ask the investors to say after they see the presentations hey tell us one two and three which was your

favorite startup and then we give two points for first place one point for second place a half point for third place. And then I create another device. Third place and second place, you just say the name of the company. First place, you explain why you picked them for first place. So if you get first place, you get like an effusive couple of sentences from the person who picked you. What this device also does is, hey, you picked us as number two, was wondering if I could follow up with you or put us in our investor updates. Yeah. See, it kind of creates a little bit of a connective tissue with some number of investors. Also, you know, if you don't get picked, you know, for three weeks in a row, you have to say, well, why are these other companies getting picked?

And then you start to, because you're seeing why those people are getting a startup investor or a product investor or market investor or founder investor fit. And it could be any of those things, right? They just love the founder's presentation ability. And they'll say that. I just love the founder. Wow, so dogged, so funny, so clever, so insightful, great answers. They might just say that, right?

You've experienced that, Garum, and they just love a founder. Other time, they're like, I love it. this market. This market's great. It's right for disruption. Oh, my God. Everybody's going to be doing more medical procedures. They're getting safer. Yeah, I love this market. You can get all those things that occur, but what's most important is the competitive nature of getting into an accelerator. Then I said, well, how do we make the accelerator itself have a little competition in it? Just to get people at the top of their game. When you're playing basketball and everybody shoots 35 to 40% from three-point range, or, you know, 80 or 90% from the free throw lining,

you don't, you know what you're going to do? You're going to come to the gym and hour early until you do because you want to make the team. So if your design sucks, your market sucks, your business model sucks, and you see other people solving those problems, you just fix it. That's the great part, I think. Exactly. Well, if everyone wants to check out what Doctours is up to, it's Doctours.com, and you can take a peek around there.

It's quite a lot of good stuff on there. It was really easy to prep for the session. I'm curious. Where are you based? I'm in Huntsville, Alabama today. Love it. And this is a co-working facility you're in or just a fancy background? This is the ground floor of our apartment building.

Oh, wow. They have like a co-working space? Sweet. They have a co-working space, yeah. Awesome, yeah. And fundraising, you're getting good feedback from investors. Yeah. They have a, when they give you like really considered feedback,

any consistent feedback you're getting or feedback that you know is like they're just afraid to say, I don't want to invest in this business. I'm just going to give you like a, BS reason. And have you been able to learn to parse those things? Yeah, the liability question is definitely number one. We've gotten some back from the launch team, but also other investors to have the legal side be very robust and make sure that we're legally protected. I think that's what investors care a lot about. I just want to pause you on that. We have an investment in Gigster and Meowtao Stone Algo. These are three very different marketplaces.

Cat sitting, diamonds. Gister figured out insurance in a major way. So if you want to meet Yuri and the team over there, just ask Jackie or Bianca to introduce you to Gikster. And then I think Meowtel got their insurance for cat sitting. That's a really interesting thing. You could say to the person who's doing the tourism, would you like to get insurance in case your trip gets postponed or canceled?

That insurance exists in the world. I get upselled on it all the time. I never take it, but I should think about it. Then there's insurance, you know, for the other side, which I'm sure they have, but they could get it for Americans. And if you said to them, hey, we want you to pay $100 insurance, you know, as part of the Spiff or whatever or the affiliate, if people ask for it, will you underwrite it if that's like the thing that is such a deciding factor for them. If you're in Turkey, it's required. The government requires clinics to have insurance for their foreigner patients. Interesting.

But, yeah, yeah, this isn't true for Mexico or. I'm not exactly sure about South Korea, but it is something that we could offer both sides. I think you could become a blogging machine. And I think if you just spoke into a computer with somebody interviewing you, and then you had somebody who's a good writer, write blog posts based on what you're saying, and then put citations into it,

you could start with just you have an FAQ, but a blog about this, and then put it on Stubstack, put it on Beehive, put it on LinkedIn, and then you make slightly different versions of it for different platforms. Now you're getting multiple swings at bat in the SEO slash large language model. So that one is like, tell me about the insurance. Do hair transplant insurance, you know, Mexico versus whatever. Or a landing page for hair transplants or dental implants,

Mexico versus Turkey, Turkey, Turkey versus France, France versus Spain, what to expect, etc. What you'll see is in the SaaS companies, the savvy SaaS companies will make Salesforce versus HubSpot, HubSpot versus Salesforce. It's very interesting. On the Salesforce web landing page or whatever, Salesforce wins in their estimation. On the HubSpot landing page, they'll go back and forth and have this really objective, like, shootout between the two products. Miraculously, HubSpot wins. Angel List did an incredible job of this. I send people, even though I have the syndicate, I just send people to Angel List. They got ahead of us. They wrote all this incredible FAQs about angel investing, QSBS, they took the risk of saying, hey, we're going to just

put that information out there. Other people would be like, oh, don't give financial advice, don't give advice on this, don't give advice on. They like, just like, screw it, we're giving advice. We're going to just explain this stuff to you. Investopedia does a good job at that. So, yeah, I would look at those two sites or those couple of sites as inspiration. And it could be very lightweight for you to hire a writer to do this. Like, it might be $100 per page. You get interviewed by them over a Zoom or you just talking to a microphone. They make the pages you read them, approve them, read them, approve them, read them,

approve them, boom. Totally. All right, another amazing office hours. I can't wait to see you in Texas. We're going to do some sort of Texas thing. You like barbecue? Don't tell me your vegan, please. You like barbecue?

Don't tell me you're a vegan. Great job. Doctors. Is it dot com? We're dot us. Dot AI. It's dot co. We're working on the dot com.

I mean, it's a good name. Doctors, I like it. It's very clever. I wouldn't worry about it. You could get doctors or go doctors. com as blockers. Then when you negotiate with Doctors.com, you could say,

list and we don't need it. We've already invested the SEO in this. But if we could get it, it's nice, obviously, so it would give you this dollar amount. And that's actually becomes true, right? Because the truth is, like a great.com does build trust. Uber went from Uber cab to Uber.com and they bought that for a couple million bucks. Yeah, good luck with it. And I'm really excited. I think you're going to have an amazing business. It's going to cash flow great and great questions today. Awesome. Thank you. It was great meeting. view off and

anything else in our docket that we need to get to here, any housekeeping, any founder university stuff, any dates we have to promote. Uh, no,

I don't think we have a whole lot of summit, all in summit, September, allin.com slash yada, yada, yada, or you just do allin.com and just click on events.

But I like to say all in.com slash yada, yada, yada. It actually, I think, redirects to the Allens Summit. Uh,

this week in startups. dot com slash docket and uh cautious optimism on substack and i'm like calicanus i think that's substack com go sign up for email newsletters i'm going to start writing again i decided i got to unleash my superpower which is writing and get get back in the writing game i'm so jealous of you writing every day uh we'll talk he's uh alex what is he he's alex wilhelm so that means on twitter x He might be X.com slash Alex. Yes, sir. Ridiculous.

I'm X.com slash Jason, equally ridiculous. And now my Instagram is at Jason. So go over there if you want to get cheesecake photos of me. You know, now that I'm then, I'm starting to do these. I take pictures of myself, like with a sultry look. And then I send them to my wife. Like me sipping a cup of coffee. I'm like, I do this.

My little cute eyebrow up. And then I send it to her. And you know what I say? What? You're welcome. You're welcome. I love that. Was that Moana that had the song, You're Welcome?

Yeah, it's sung by the rock. If I did that to my wife, to know she was... I love that song. It's so great. It's the worst, like, most crazy thing in the world. All right, everybody. Oh, we didn't do the Tesla story. Lightning around it for me.

Yep. Invites are out for the Tesla launch in Austin. This is their Robotoxy event. Yes. I believe they're still shooting for the 22nd. It's going to be a geo-fenced area with 10 cars. is to start. There's going to be remote safety people, which you and I both think is a great way to kick off the overall push. And as far as I can tell from social media, Jason, they are inviting

Tesla-friendly influencers to be among the first people. And that's smart because I'll ensure there'll be TikToks, Instagrams, and otherwise tweets about what people are doing. So I'm stoked. I want more competition and self-driving. I want Waymo to be scared and in a hurry. So I can't wait, and I hope it goes well. Yeah, it's going to go well. I got to ride in, uh, one of them with the cyber taxi, Robotaxi, as I said, on Saturday in Palo Alto, did three rides all flawless. It's a bit more aggressive than the version I have is my perception.

That may be just me projecting into it, but I actually sat in the driver's seat. And I think they're ready to slowly do testing with a safety driver. Now, the safety driver in this instance is going to be in the right-hand seat. I saw a screenshot. So when you do it, you can bring an extra person with you according to. There was somebody had tweeted like the, somebody tweeted all like the details.

It's geoffence. It's 6 a.m. to midnight. If it's inclement weather, they're turning it off. And there's a safety driver in the right passenger seat, front right passenger seat. So you can take the two back seats. You can bring one person with you. If they're 18 years old, you can do social media. The person in the right, I saw an interface.

Somebody had screenshot at it. There's two big buttons. Pull over and stop. So the safety monitor, which is not a safety driver, because they're not able to take over the steering wheel, can press one of two buttons. I think this is halfway to what I think they should do. I think they should have just put a safety driver in, just called it a day. But I guess they feel confident. And there is a big self-correcting mechanism here.

If they get an accident, they got big problems. And then I also saw that the state, I don't know if you saw this, the state had sent a letter to Tesla. Did you see this? I saw headlines about that as I was prepping the show. But, please. So there's the state sent a letter like, hey, we have some rules here. We need you to, you know, dial us in. So lest anybody think that there are not self-correcting mechanisms here for the self-driving

companies there are. And there was a Volkswagen ID Buzz. Pull up that headline if you don't mind. Well, we'll take your time. But I just want to give people the full context of what's going on here. So as you can see there, it's obviously. obviously geo-fenced massively. The Tesla bears are like, oh, didn't you say you can do it anywhere?

Of course you can do it anywhere. Supervised FSD can work anywhere. Unsupervised FSD cannot. So of course they're going to, now that doesn't mean they can't quickly learn. They will quickly learn because it's a neural net. It's designed to simulate off of hundreds of millions of hours they've collected. Oh, yeah. But it's geof-fenced.

and, you know, there's a terms of service and all that other stuff. This is not like Waymo, which is ahead of them, obviously, in terms of deployment. This is like kind of Waymo, this is somewhere between Waymo

having a safety driver in the seat, in the driver's seat, and only doing Google and Alphabet passengers. Yeah. And, you know, Waymo public. So it's just kind of right in between those. Seems very wise.

And then here's the Volkswagen headline. So Volkswagen has a, has its own, self-driving group. It's called Moia, M-O-I-A. It's been pretty stealthy, like they don't really talk too much, but they're doing really consequential work. Zooks is also doing very consequential work in larger-sized vehicles. Yes. That the ID Buzz is an incredible car. It opens on both sides. So this is going to be good for the Uber pool lift line concept. I still believe five people will be up

if I had to take a guess I think there'll be five operators in a major city in New York in a major city in the U.S. Five operators of robo taxis within two years in one city. Over under, where do you got?

You obviously have Waymo in Austin already. Or imminently, let's just assume Tesla figures out and next year, Q1, Q2, they open it up. up to people. So that would be two. So three more got to be added. I would put Zooks. The Volkswagen. Volkswagen IDBuzz and then probably one other. We ride. We ride.

Or pony.a. I'm bad at sports betting. So I want to be more aggressive than your timeline. Does that I mean I'm taking the over or the under? So you mean there'll be five in under 24. I'll take the over. I'll take the over. I think it's under too. But maybe I set the line to. So if I said 18 months, would you be under 18 months or above it? 18 months of five. That's kind of where my equilibrium point is. So for the sake of being spicy, I'll say under, but that's probably... Okay, I'll take over on 18. That's it. Okay. So let's set a date in the notion to check back, and that anytime we see a city hit three unique providers, we do that. I got a inside piece of information from China on self-driving

and job destruction. I mean to talk about the Andy Jassy letter, which you can pull up. The Andy Jassy letter was pretty interesting for me, and I saw Andy Jassy at the KOTU conference. I got to ask from a question or two. In China, I was talking to a major CEO, founder from China. This is the message from Andy Jassy about generative AI and its impact and that they're going to have less employees because of AI. And that's the white collar side of the business. But I asked them about self-driving, Zooks, delivery drones, etc.

I think the most impacted company by AI in the world is going to be Amazon. Positive or negative? Positive in that it's going to make their earnings go crazy. Yes. Negative for society in that they're going to hemorrhage delivery jobs and factory jobs and white collar jobs. Yes. They're going to, they're going to up and down the stack, decrease their staff size by 5% a year for five years. Which net net compounding means they'll have 35% less people in the company, something in that range.

It's going to get very, it's going to be a third smaller or a third of the job. are going to go away inside of Amazon in five years. Now, do they add jobs for other opportunistic things as possible? But I think of the current job mix, I could see a third going away because of these technologies. In China, there's deep concern inside the party government about jobs. Young men work as drivers. Yes. Young men unemployed right in the streets.

We saw this in Greece. We saw it in Italy. We see it in the Middle East from time to time. Whenever the number of young men, 18 to 30 years old, unemployment hits about 15, 20%, you get a little bit of uprising. If it goes above 20%, you get riots in the street. You can look at Greece, employment riots,

Spain employment riots, and other countries. Middle East, I think maybe Lebanon, Egypt would be another one. I think Egypt, in that demographic, there's a lot of unemployment. And then those people have no time, have free time, and then they can become radicalized. Right. And what does the Chinese Communist Party really value above all, which is political stability and maintenance of control?

Harmony, sure. And so I think I'm showing a news article here showing that this is back from February. So the data's a little bit old here, Jason. But youth unemployment in China rose to about 17%. Holy cow. What a poll. That's shocking. Yeah.

It's really high. It's much higher than the overall rate of unemployment in the country. But a problem that China has is simply that its economy cannot absorb the non-eastern, of highly qualified college graduates that it produces. And so they have a surplus. And so if we're talking about white color job destruction being a problem here in the U.S., well, it's going to be twice.

India is another situation where they're taking full villages in India and transplanting them to Singapore, you know, Dubai, Qatar, et cetera, for health care work, nurses, doctors, construction, et cetera, restaurants. So they'll go to a village where there's no jobs and everybody's unemployed in India and they're like, hey, here's an opportunity. So when there's displacement like this, there's opportunity. There's cognitive and, you know, atom and bit-based moving surplus of

energy. You can take this energy and use it. Athena is using it, right? Taking assistance, go to AthenaWow.com and get like a month or a couple weeks off. they're I'm the first investor in that company and a partner and so they're shipping $3,000 a month assistance, $36,000 a year all in. No extra health benefits, taxes, hiring. They'll just swap them in and out and you get an assistant for half the price of the United States who really wants a job, who will work harder than anybody in the United States ever would or 90% of Americans ever would. And they call you, sorry, it's quite charming. Anything else I can do for you? It's like really service-based.

There's an opportunity. Yeah. there's an opportunity there. Those folks in China who can't get jobs, what can the Chinese government use them for? Where could they be deployed? And every time you see that, and I think, you know,

that's the thing I've been thinking about with job displacement in the U.S. And somebody challenged me on, I think it was Saks at this Kutu conference or whatever, and I said, well, what if we just double the number of teachers, doctors, nurses, and people who do elder care? Yeah.

What if, like, all these, You can take those 16% who are unemployed, and you could say you now all work at nursing homes, and your job is to watch TV with them, take them on walks, do a cooking class. Yeah. You know, basically be a camp counselor. It's a camp counseling job. Let's call it what it is. These people have nothing to do.

They're retired, just like kids have nothing to do in the summer. You're a camp counselor. Keep them busy, make it fun. The end. So this is what I want founders to start thinking about. If there were 10,000 door dashers available to do something else, what would you have them do? Oh, interesting. So how to get ahead of the freed up labor force of people that are currently, ah.

What could 10,000 door dashers do if it's not bringing you boba? They could make me boba and sushi. You know, I'm just getting... Well, no, I mean, it's an honest question. And so is there a handyman job? Is there a butler job? I know this sounds crazy. Oh.

Do you want to start a community garden? you know, dog walking. There are other things that in society maybe rich people do. Chefs, personal chef. Rich people have personal chefs. Poor people like eat fast food and don't cook and, you know, then there's everything in between.

What if there was somebody, you know, who has one of these cooking marketplaces and they say, hey, we're going to teach people to cook. They're going to cook a meal for 10 families. And those 10 families come and pick up from this community kitchen, their 10 meals at a really reasonable price. It doesn't get delivered to them. They have to pick it up on the way home from work.

But they get a healthy dinner, leftovers for a lot, and then a brown bag lunch and a breakfast for the next day for, you know, $12 a person and it's healthy and it's great. And they buy it for sushi. So start thinking like that, the businesses that didn't have employees or couldn't get employees, what if there were too many employees and people who said, yeah, I'll work for anything? That's what happened with Uber and DoorDish. There was a surplus of people who wanted to do gig work. I predict millions to tens of millions of gig workers coming on the market.

Man, that is at once an incredibly exciting point and also a very scary one. I think I'm going to take the optimistic side of it, but we have a lot of work to do to rebalance the economy in a post-CHAPT world. Never squander, never squander a crisis. Chaos. That's capitalism, is a ladder. Chaos is a ladder, yeah. All right, everybody.

We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye. Thank you.